BAckStory LaToya Frazier Ron Jude Guillaume Simoneau

July 18 – Oct. 6, 2013

Ron Jude. Trapper on the Lick Creek Line #5, 2011

The three artists featured in this concepts of space, time, and location and then placing their pictures in the formal exhibition—LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ron brought about by new technologies. We settings of museums and galleries. The raw Jude, and Guillaume Simoneau—tell share our personal stories quickly and in honesty of their approach and perceived autobiographical stories by intertwining real time via smartphones and online social looseness in their style (from the tradition of personal with the social, networks, indulging both our inner showoff the “snapshot aesthetic”) departed radically political, and cultural conditions of place. and voyeur. The artists in this exhibition from the more classical approaches to Although they draw from their personal reflect the fluidity of our information- documenting personal histories employed archives and backstories, their work is not saturated world by mixing personal and by artists such as Harry Callahan, Edward entirely factual or diary-like. Instead they communal histories and blurring the Weston, and many others who preceded make projects that provide both specific boundaries between the individual and them. Fast-forward a few decades to an and universal commentary—their individual the collective. Yet they address personal era where there are boundless virtual histories becoming conduits for exploring narrative in a slower, more deliberate, and opportunities for self-projection, and collective experience. They also probe the more poetic way than electronic forms of exhibitionism turns rampant. Although no fleeting, ineffable nature of the past and communication typically allow, in works less poignant, works like those by Billingham present, as they investigate the capacity that are carefully authored, engagingly and Goldin, or the more recent work of of photography to at once promote and ambiguous, and deeply felt. Frazier, Jude, and Simoneau, may now seem destabilize our sense of individual identity. Just a few decades ago, in the 1980s and like a particularly measured approach to Our relationships to both photography 1990s, artists like Nan Goldin and Richard telling a personal story. and the idea of the personal narrative have Billingham redefined autobiographical The last few decades have also seen significantly changed in recent years, due photography by taking extremely revealing, sweeping shifts in attitudes toward the very in large part to the markedly increasing at times shocking, pictures of their family idea of documentary practice. Postmodern accessibility of information and the shifting and friends in a seemingly casual manner, theory taught us to analyze and distrust the Ron Jude. Blue Girl on TV, from emmett, 1984/2010 motives of the photographer and lobbed In this project, Jude selects images that they also tell a new and ambiguous story profound challenges at photography’s ability range from the mundane to the oddball, and that reflects his changing relationship to the to capture any sort of phenomenological masterfully sequences them for heightened photographs and the events and memories reality. We are living in what some theorists impact, enhancing their mystery by omitting they convey over time. Indeed, Jude and artists refer to as a “post-documentary” captions and context. The book has no text; characterizes the viewer’s experience of the era. To be sure, photographic artists of the images intended to illustrate journalistic project as echoing the process of trying to today like Frazier, Jude, and Simoneau prose have been equalized—printed in black piece together personal stories from slivers understand that documentation is changing and white, often with the newsprint half- of memory with the aid of photographic and inherently subjective. Most of them pattern visible. A collapsed bridge, sports, documents. To this end, he repeats motifs, work comfortably with the assumption that the wilderness, and various headshots and bringing the viewer back to the same subject photography is both evidentiary and illusory. snapshots form a random assortment of again and again in a way that counters Artists also fully grasp the power dynamics of images that ultimately invite an ascription of linear narrative progression. As he explains, the camera (which can be used as shield and oblique strangeness to small town Idaho. “We build linear about our lives, probe alike), as well as the malleable, unfixed In the second chapter, emmett (2010), our relationships—our entire sense of nature of both the photographic subject and Jude resurrects and reprints photographs ourselves—out of incomplete fragments. its interpretation. he took as a teenager in the 1980s to Photographs not only give us a false sense Ron Jude (American, b. 1965) has investigate the past as an idea and recognize of the past, but they get in the way of created a trilogy of projects, all originally the incomprehensible nature of self and deeper reflection. They as verifiable, conceptualized as books, based on his place. Conveying scenes such as drag sentimentalized proof of something that home state of Idaho. The first chapter is racing, teenagers, forests, rainbows, and doesn’t exist.”1 Alpine Star (2006), a project made using lightning, the images reflect the cultural The trilogy ends withLick Creek Line photographs culled exclusively from his and sociological specificity of his teenage (2012), an enigmatic photo essay about a fur hometown newspaper, The Star News. Jude years—growing up in an isolated small town trapper in Idaho that dances on the divide grew up in McCall, Idaho, a small town in enclosed by nature long before the era of the between documentation and . In these mid-state with a population of 2,900 people Internet. Jude evokes and recontextualizes pictures, a romantic, perhaps nostalgic, that swells to over 10,000 in the summer. these experiences in the present so that conception of the State of Idaho as a place LaToya Ruby Frazier. Self Portrait in Gramps’ Pajamas, 2009 where people live simple lives in untamed and social struggles of her family and two approaches—social documentary wilderness bumps up against more sinister community in her hometown of Braddock, photography and conceptual art—and stereotypes of backwoods characters who Pennsylvania. Her pictures are bluntly characterizes complex, intergenerational kill animals, wear plaid, and live in shacks autobiographical, showing her grandmother, struggles as both participant and author. full of dusty bottles, stuffed animal heads, her mother, and herself—three generations In addition to her still photographs, Frazier and bloody instruments that attest to their of women whose familial history traces the has made videos both in collaboration hunting prowess. Jude also documents the decline of industrial American cities. Frazier’s with her mother and individually, as seen reality of a natural landscape that is being grandmother lived in Braddock when it was in Self-Portrait (United States Steel) (2010), continually blemished by new developments home to a vibrant and prosperous steel where a solemn, bare-chested Frazier deeply in pictures of a chairlift running across the industry, her mother witnessed the closing breathes in and out in one frame next to an tree canopy, a new housing development, and of many steel mills and the subsequent image of a steel mill pumping out toxins in a wooden railing at the edge of a patio whose economic , and Frazier watched another, creating an unnerving commentary intricate design distracts from the grand members of her community succumb to on social inequality and pollution. mountain landscape behind it. Throughout drug addiction, poverty, and terminal illness Like Frazier, Gui llaume Simoneau the series, old competes with new, wilderness caused by massive industrial pollution. (Canadian, b. 1978) chronicles an intimate with the human attempt to tame it, and the Photographs made by Frazier—sometimes relationship as both a form of diary and as overall lack of narrative arc encourages our in collaboration with or authored by her a reflection on wider societal and political reading of the project to vacillate between mother—tell the family story. A dialog about issues. His project Love and War (2011) fact and . identity as it pertains to self, family, and tracks his on-again, off-again relationship Also returning to the place of her community emerges alongside a nuanced with a woman named Caroline Annandale. childhood, LaToya Ruby Frazier portrait of the shifting circumstances of Simoneau first met Annandale at the (American, b. 1982) has spent the last twelve blue-collar America within this project. Maine Photographic Workshop in 2000. years extensively documenting the economic To create this narrative, Frazier blends Both in their early twenties, they began an intense, youthful relationship and traveled someone else, but they reunited several from Iraq, text messages, and handwritten the world together just prior to September years later upon her return from war to notes, Simoneau charts the couple’s love 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks on begin a tumultuous second chapter in their affair and its attendant ups and downs, the United States, Annandale enlisted in relationship. Using a variety of images, but not in chronological order. Sequenced the US army and was sent to Iraq. The two including pictures he took when they first to mimic the disjointed nature of memory, grew apart, Annandale eventually marrying met, photographs Annandale emailed home communication, and identity, the project reveals how our ideas about ourselves and of our loved ones are always a blend of past and present. As the photographs accumulate, they expose Annandale’s loss of innocence and her transformation into a toughened war veteran. Ultimately, Simoneau reveals the lasting impact—the invisible, indelible, and irreversible effects that both love and war have on people’s lives. Using diverse approaches, the artists in this exhibition share an expansive, fluid view of what it means to navigate personal histories through photographic documentation. Tinged with voyeurism and saturated with an awareness of our desire to connect with others, their works invite active and individual engagement with these intensely personal, yet universal, stories of coming of age, the place we come from, and the people important to us. In this way they an even deeper experience of personal narrative that exists not in the social or in the collective, but in our interior realm, where we seek to understand our individual selves, often through the stories of others.

Karen Irvine, Curator and Associate Director

Guillaume Simoneau. Caroline, Kennesaw, Georgia, 2008

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